The Salesforce platform provides users a 360 degree view of their customers, helping them connect and nurture relationships in a whole new way. An initiative at the company is Salesforce Live, which has webcasts, productions and events, including a live broadcast of Dreamforce.

Hosted in downtown San Francisco by Salesforce, Dreamforce is an annual, massively attended conference. Bringing together a mixture of thought leaders and professionals, the event has historically attracted over 170,000 people to attend. The focus of the show is often on keynote addresses, training sessions and networking events among many other activities that take place at the conference.

When it came to the topic of expanding the audience for the venue, online proved a natural fit. “Streaming is a huge part of Dreamforce, has been for many years,” said Michael Rivo, Business Director of Salesforce Live. “We put a big effort into driving large audiences for our Dreamforce broadcast. For the past several years we’ve had millions of viewers in real time watching the live stream of the broadcast.”

To help achieve this goal, the underlying technology had to be accessible and reliable while creating an overall high quality production for online viewers. For more information on the infrastructure used to support the large audiences, be sure to download this Live Video Delivery System Built for Scalability white paper as well.

“The ESPN of technology.” That’s how Jeff Frick, general manager and host of theCUBE, describes his interview show. Founded in 2010 by tech media company SiliconANGLE, theCUBE streams news and interviews from events in Silicon Valley and beyond, and these days it has become must-see programming for tech fans everywhere.

“We go to the big tech events, drop in a live studio and interview the ‘tech athletes,'” says Frick. In 2017, theCUBE will conduct approximately 1,500 interviews from over 100 events. At major annual conferences like AWS re:Invent and VMworld, Frick and his production team will interview as many as 70 tech leaders.

The vast majority of theCUBE’s on-location interviews are streamed live and are also available on demand, along with other in-studio interviews. Some fans of theCUBE tune in via computers or mobile devices for an entire day’s coverage while they’re at work, jumping back to the site when noteworthy tech figures and keynote speakers appear. Event attendees, meanwhile, watch theCUBE interviews when they return from the conference to get additional insight from various executives and customers, Frick says.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I would like to take the time to thank each of our customers. Thank you for using our video platform. Thank you for streaming with us and for pushing creative boundaries to come up with great content and innovative use cases for streaming. And, thank you for your support as we’ve transitioned into the IBM family of offerings.

And, an enormous thank you goes out to the 68 of you who took the time this year to write a review about your use of our technology on Trust Radius (3rd party review website). The products we offer started as a way to help people connect with other people in a dynamic way, in real time, and it’s very satisfying to read your stories and understand how our technology is helping you to do great things that engage your customers and employees.

Viewers worldwide are cancelling their cable TV packages and turning to online broadcasts at a steady rate. In the U.S. alone, nearly 25 million households lacked cable by the end of 2015. More than 1 million American households are expected to cut the cord this year, and they will be joined by millions more households across the globe.

But it’s not just weekday sitcoms, made-for-TV movies and daily news that are migrating online. Sports fans are clamoring to stream their favorite teams—and that’s where Footters, which launched this month, sees an opportunity.

Based in Spain, Footters is an online streaming company providing a platform for federated soccer clubs—the semi-professional and even professional players who are part of clubs worldwide that aren’t popular enough to merit the blanket television coverage given to the English Premier League or La Liga, Spain’s top professional soccer association. These minor league clubs might not be powerful enough to ink their own television deals, but they have a large, largely underserved audience. With an estimated 24 million clubs comprising 270 million players around the world, Footters’ potential reach is enormous.

Video moves people. The human brain absorbs video with much less work than it takes to process text. As a result, we’d rather watch than read, and we end up sharing videos more than almost any other type of content on the internet. Leading organizations are recognizing this, and they’re expanding their use of video as a tool for driving better business outcomes.

The streaming video success stories infographic below illustrates eight great results that organizations are achieving using streaming video. Click on the infographic and it will open in PDF format, with each result linking to a two-minute video that explains how it was achieved. Which result is most relevant to your goals?

For the fastest path to results, tell us the type of impact you need from streaming video, and we can coach you on the best practices most relevant to delivering it.

Point your camera at a religious service, touch the “Go Live” button, and your stream could reach dozens or even thousands of people in places you’ve never heard of. You can’t be sure what effect it might have on your audience.

Maybe you’re a rabbi sitting in front of a webcam in your office, about to play guitar and chat online with visitors to your weekly online-only synagogue. Or maybe you’re behind a camera that will sweep across 4,000 parishioners in a megachurch and send the service out to 50,000 viewers around the world.

Both these examples are among the roughly one thousand religious organizations that share their services on Ustream.tv each week. Whether the audience is vast or small, each producer wants to offer a high-quality, reliable video stream that is a gift for viewers to receive.

We asked experienced producers who stream religious services to share with us the top tips that make their work successful and rewarding. Read on to get their advice. And get started free with IBM Cloud Video (includes Ustream) to stream your own religious service.

Nothing conveys emotion like live video. You watch it and feel it in the same moment. This SolarCity use case video explores why live video plays such an important role at SolarCity: it’s the vehicle for executive-led town halls, interactive trainings and webinars that bring together 15,000 employees across many locations and departments.

“If you haven’t seen jousting before, picture your worst nightmare come true,” says Luke Campbell, chief operating officer at Epicentre.tv, which is streaming the first World Jousting Championship this weekend on IBM Cloud Video. “It’s two guys running on horseback, down a tilt line, 60 kilometers an hour (about 40 miles an hour) using wooden lances with metal tips to knock each other off. It’s insane, actually. You have to witness it to believe it.”

Tour de Office, an Australian nonprofit, is encouraging office-bound workers to get more active while raising money for charity — and streaming video plays a key role.

“The growing knowledge economy is putting more people behind desks for longer periods of time,” says Tudor Marsden-Huggins, an avid cyclist and founder of Employment Office, a recruitment agency based in Australia. “Research shows that sitting for more than four hours per day greatly increases your risk of chronic disease.”

In 2011, Marsden-Huggins launched Tour de Office, a week-long relay event to raise awareness of those health risks. The events are part friendly athletic competition, part fundraising challenge. Participating companies compete for a charity of their choice, and Tour de Office live streams the action online to maximize donations. (See how a live stream solution like this quickly scales.)

On August 21, a total solar eclipse will take place in the U.S. for the first time since 1979.

“It began with no ado,” wrote Annie Dillard of the event 38 years ago. “It was odd that such a well-advertised public event should have no starting gun, no overture, no introductory speaker. I should have known right then that I was out of my depth.”

Viewers of this year’s eclipse can expect the same wonder that Dillard describes in her now-famous essay, but those who tune into NASA’s 2017 live broadcast will hear commentary, too.

The eclipse has captured the world’s attention, but it’s not the only event NASA will live stream this year. Online video plays an important, dual role for the space organization. Its regular live broadcasts, using CDNs and services like IBM Cloud Video, are a way to communicate with the public whose tax dollars support its missions, while video is also an indispensable internal tool for research and development.

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